Lines and Curves
by The Seven of Us
Summary: Fem!Steve went down in history as the first woman to see combat in the American military, the first woman to fight on the front lines, the first woman to get any sort of rank in the American military, and the first woman to give her life for her country. She's also, on an unrelated note, the first woman to say "no" to Bucky Barnes. AU. By Ruby.
1. Bucky Barnes

**Fem!Steve went down in history as the first woman to see combat in the American military, the first woman to fight on the front lines, the first woman to get any sort of rank in the American military, and the first woman to give her life for her country. She's also, on an unrelated note, the first woman to say "no" to Bucky Barnes—though, in all actuality, _Bucky_ never asked her, but he did make the same face that she did when they were asked about their "romance of the ages".**

 **Meanwhile, Bucky Barnes went down in history as the only person that Captain America laughed with on public television, and the first person to survive almost seventy years on ice. (Stevie was the second, of course.)**

* * *

If it had been any time but the Depression, Bucky would have made her take defense classes. He knew, from the many and varied books in the library, that there were some kinds of drills that took more skill than strength and wouldn't tax Stevie's fragile body.

"Shove off, Buck," she'd say after yet _another_ mishap in a dead-end alley and he cleaned up her pretty face.

"You keep thinking that you're such a punk—"

"That _stings_ , you jerk! How the hell does that hurt worse than getting it in the first place!"

"Because you got in a scrap in some dumbass, dead-beat, dirty alley way with three grown men, punk," Bucky would snarl back (or some variation of). "So shut up and deal with it, Princess Punk."

And then she'd scoff, and gesture to herself. "Please, three year olds draw women with more curves than I do. I don't even have a cycle."

"If you'd take care of yourself better—"

"I swear to God, Bucky, finish that sentence and I'll make _sure_ to punch you hard enough to remove the bandages that you just put on my knuckles."

And so it would continue. Honestly, Bucky Barnes felt like he was on a perpetual loop: sleep, eat, work, eat, take a girl out, and go back to sleep, and somewhere in that mess would be taking care of Stephanie Rogers. Sometimes it would be her gift for finding trouble, sometimes it was yet another illness, sometimes it was just battling the cold.

Then he got the draft. Stevie had taken one look at the list that he'd "signed up" on and gone pale.

Stephanie Rogers and Bucky Barnes most definitely didn't have a "love story for the ages", but they did love each other to pieces.

But it didn't matter for the moment, because Stevie locked herself in her room for a solid six hours.

When she came out, Bucky fell flat on his back into her room, miraculously not knocking her over. She crouched, the whites of her blue eyes shot through with red veins and skin streaked with shiny tears. "If you don't come back to me, James Barnes, I will tell _everyone_ that we had wild and passionate sex. Enthusiastically. Out of wedlock."

And despite her obvious tells of crying, her voice was steady and laced with steel.

"But—"

"And then!" she added loudly, overriding his confused protests, "And then I will bury you with a Yankees ballcap and tell everyone that you were an avid fan."

"Hey! You—"

"And then!" she added once more, voice getting even louder. "And then, if you aren't actually dead and are just faking for kicks, I will _personally_ be your one-woman army and I'll get you out or die trying."

Bucky couldn't breathe, his shocked blue eyes staring at her steely blue ones.

"Do you understand, soldier!" she barked.

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Good!"

Then she bent over and interspersed her dripping tears with kisses to his face, sobbing quietly.

He didn't know that she signed up for the army.

Didn't know that she'd been part of some kind of super-something-or-other until he faked being dead and she became his own personal one-woman army to get him out.

Didn't know that she'd died because he'd been in HYDRA's hands for days and heavily sedated.

Didn't know that she even existed until seventy years later, almost to the day.

Didn't know that she made good on her word until he went to the Smithsonian and read the good-natured ribbing of the Howling Commandos about how "Stevie and Bucky sure tried to live up to the name".

Didn't know that she'd even succeeded at burying his empty coffin—via his sisters—with nothing but a lonely baseball cap in it until she'd told him.

Didn't know that in a few short weeks from the present, his life would go from fairly normal to _absolutely fuckin' insane_.

It would make for interesting stories, at least.

* * *

 **I despair for my writing times. It took ten months to produce 13K words. I literally remember sitting down and hammering out 13K in eight hours once. XD**

 **This story is FINISHED and will be updated once a week until all eight chapters are posted. :) Enjoy!**

 **-Ruby**


	2. Steve Rogers

Stephanie Rogers was not one for sexism. In fact, she found it absolutely irritating.

"Sweetheart, your husband needs to come and complete his form in person," said the officer.

"If you'd look at the name, you'd see that it's _my_ submission to be in the army wherever would be most helpful," Stevie said coolly.

The officer blinked twice, then actually looked at the file in his hands. Then flipped through the pages, frowning more and more.

"Don't even try, doll," he said. "Though, even if you were a man, I'd still tell you the same thing. You've got a list of problems as long as my arm—literally. Go home. Buy bonds."

"But, sir!"

"Next!"

* * *

Three applications as a woman rejected. Another four as a man rejected.

(Thank God for her nonexistent breasts.)

"You are a very interesting man, Steve Rogers."

Stevie whirled.

"There's a program," he continued, his accent heavy and rolling. "Experimental. You would still have to go through basic training, but you could potentially be accepted into the Army."

"Yes," she said immediately.

And that was that.

* * *

 _Dear Agent Carter_ , Stevie later thought, mentally peeing herself from laughter. _I'm sorry for hiding my gender and potentially letting myself out as available to date. I just wanted a ride in a car so that I didn't have to keep up with my fellow trainees (who are, incidentally, idiots). Sincerely, Stephanie Rogers_

 _Yeah,_ she added. _That would go over really well._

* * *

It went over even better when the serum that they injected her with gave her breasts, full and _heavy_ , what the hell, why where they so heavy?

Honestly, she knew for a fact that Howard Stark had seen some breasts, it was practically announced to anyone within three degrees of him. Yet, the man still gaped at her chest like he'd never seen a pair before.

"That…was not intentional, I promise," Stark managed to stammer out, still staring at her chest. "I…um…we can, uh, fix this. Probably."

Agent Carter, even, seemed stuck on her chest, too, and wordlessly shrugged out of her blazer to give it to Stevie.

Then Dr. Erskine was shot, and Stevie bolted after the killer, after realizing that saving the man was not possible.

Running with breasts was painful, Stevie decided, and resolved to not do it again without some kind of support.

* * *

Howard Stark showed up on her doorstep not three hours after the fact, looking frazzled.

"Stark," she said, before he could get a word out. "Don't try. There was nothing in the serum that made me a woman."

He just stared at her dumbly for at least six seconds before it finally clicked, and he went from worried to furious in a blink of an eye, then extremely tired. He flopped down on the ground like his knees had given out from under him.

"I don't know how you survived, then," he said after a moment, brutally honest. "That serum was made for _men_ , Steve. What's your name, anyway?"

She quirked a smile. "Stephanie. Still go by Stevie."

Howard groaned, head thudding against the wall. "You never give up, do you?"

"I'm Irish, Mr. Stark," she said, her smile turning into a smirk. "Stubbornness is in my blood."

He groaned wordlessly.

She decided that she liked him.

* * *

Being a chorus girl was irritating to the extreme, because it was sexist and demeaning.

Otherwise, she might have enjoyed it. Actually being able to use the steps that Bucky painstakingly taught her, without having to stop to have an asthma attack? Amazing. Simply amazing.

She could see why he loved dancing now.

Although, she wasn't much for brass instruments, and much preferred guitar. The brass was far too harsh.

Her fellow girls were nice enough, she supposed. She learned how to braid, once her hair got long enough, both her own hair and someone else's hair. She learned about makeup, and how to navigate the bear traps that were heels.

And sex. She learned a hell of a lot about sex. Probably more than she ever needed to know.

Bucky would have a stroke if he found out.

Come to think of it, so would her Ma.

* * *

A month and a half in, Stevie got her first cycle at the tender age of twenty-one.

The other girls fluttered around her sympathetically, one handing her a hot water bottle and another rubbing strong hands over the tender muscles in her lower back as she cried. It hurt, worse than the pneumonia that almost killed her five years ago, worse than the broken nose that she got when she was fourteen, worse than when she stepped on a piece of broken glass in the middle of a fight. She could feel her inner muscles straining and fluttering out of her control, the pain coming in harsh waves. She was too cold and sweating buckets at the same time, her core temperature skyrocketing to a hundred and three.

After four days, her temperature broke. Six days, and her period stopped altogether.

She woke on the seventh day after passing out on the second to Jillian reading her _Dracula_ , which promptly cut off with a squeal and a, "You're awake! Sister, that is the period from hell. Let's not do that again next month, shall we?"

Stevie blanched at the very thought.

* * *

Four months on the road and then they headed to Italy.

Shortly after, she learned of the 107th's fate.

"James Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S, was he on the list of condolence letters," Stevie demanded Colonel Phillips.

"I've signed hundreds of them, but yes, it sounds familiar," he admitted.

Stevie pursed her lips, and readied herself to be Bucky's one-woman army.

* * *

"You know how to fly a plane?" she asked Peggy.

The agent looked a little startled, but nodded.

"Good. You'll be helping me get to the rest of the 107th squadron."

" _What?_ "

* * *

Howard couldn't help sticking his nose in, so _he_ ended up flying the plane.

"How exactly are you going to be getting back?" Peggy yelled over the sound of gunfire hitting the craft.

Stevie held up the radio. "I'll radio."

The radio got shot on the way down, of course.

* * *

 **I made a twitter! redheadauthor**

 **Come yell at me when I don't update this fast enough. :( -Ruby**


	3. Captain America

"What's a nice girl like you doin' in a place like this?"

She grabbed the bars and wrenched them apart enough for a man to easily slip through. "Getting you fellas out of here, what do you think?"

"Sounds like a grand idea," the same man agreed, marveling at the bent bars.

"James Barnes," she called. "Where is he? Anyone know him?"

"They took him," another man in the next cell over said. "Not two days ago. They might be experimenting on us, we don't know. They don't come back, that's for sure."

Stevie's blood ran cold, and she wrenched the rest of the cages open. "Go down that hallway, hang a right," she said, gesturing. "There will be guards at the end, you'll have to be fast and sneaky to get them down without setting off the alarm. Most of your weapons are stored in the second door on the left. Go back to the main hallway, go straight for about ten meters, take four immediate lefts, and hopefully you can follow where the guards don't want you to go to figure your way out from there."

* * *

"What the hell, Stevie?"

"I toldja I'd come for ya," she said breathlessly, snapping the restraints and slinging his right arm over her shoulders and slipping her arm around his waist. "One woman army got turned into a one woman and a squadron of men around the same time that I broke in, though."

"Lord in Heaven, Father Almighty, please don't let this be a hallucination," he muttered.

"I think it would hurt a lot less if it was a hallucination," she said as they limped through the halls. "Did you want me to punch you, just in case?"

"No, I think I'm okay," he said, dazed.

She grinned a bit to herself. "Good idea, because I joined the Army, jerk. And they think that we should be able to defend ourselves."

Bucky let out a sharp, pained laugh.

* * *

Stevie spent half a day rounding up the soldiers that scattered in—quite literally—every direction when they escaped. It definitely explained the bombed-out look that the center had. Windows were broken, crates were smashed, a tank had been _flipped_ somehow, and the east side of the building had completely caved in, the roof connected to the mostly-intact portion sagging towards the ground.

(When she said every direction, she meant that she found one man twenty meters off the ground, hanging out in a tree with a rifle, a bottle of water, his pants, one boot, and his dog tags. She had to take to bribing him with food to come down like he was one of the feral cats around the docks.)

She was also never so glad to be stuck in this suit: this bright, conspicuous, _memorable_ suit. Otherwise, she probably would have been shot about three hundred times at the end of hour five. Even with her healing factor, it would have been fatal to have been shot that many times.

Surprisingly, the 107th squadron was, paired with the bare remnants back at camp, still almost three-fourths of their original size. There was a lot of quiet rejoicing.

Stevie ended up commandeering one of the tanks for the wounded to ride on. Actually, a man named Dum-Dum Dugan decided that it was probably a good idea to have a tank, and hotwired it in the middle of the fierce battle that exploded upon escaping, and then had a hell of a time blowing Nazis to dust. (Which explained the collapsed east wing…)

So yes, three hundred odd soldiers and one semi-stupid super-actress marched thirty miles through hostile land back to safe ground.

* * *

 _And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Stephanie Rogers went on to lead the Howling Commandos to victory a dozen times over and only lost a single man: Sargent James Barnes, affectionately known as Bucky. Barnes got blown off a train in a middle of a battle between them and HYDRA, and was unable to be saved._

 _Tragically, Stephanie Rogers gave her life to save New York City and the six million people who lived there only six days later._


	4. Evasion

She breathed.

She was alive.

She was very startled by that fact.

Stephanie Rogers took a deeper breath to roust herself more awake, and she heard a door open.

"How long have I been asleep?"

She blinked open her eyes to meet the lightly startled brown eyes of a nurse in a…facsimile of a hospital.

"Almost a month, Captain," the nurse said mildly.

Stephanie sat up, the nurse immediately fluttering over to her and trying to get her to lie back down. Stevie ignored her and flexed her various muscles until they didn't burn from stiffness anymore. Then she swiftly undid her IV and lunged for the nurse, having her in a headlock in an instant.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Stevie said mildly into the nurse's ear.

Six armored men with guns burst into the room.

"Well, that explains one question," she said, still very mild. "I'm in the future. How the question is how far?"

"Sixty-eight years," the nurse gasped, sounding a little strangled. "You really have been asleep for a month, you weren't registering brainwaves before that—"

"Hush," she crooned. "That's all I needed to know, doll. Now the question is whether you guys are good guys or bad guys. I'm going with bad guys, based on the guns. I'm _really_ tired of guns being aimed at me. Can you get the nice men with the very futuristic armor to lower their guns?"

"We're not the bad guys, Captain Rogers," one of the armored men said, voice muffled by the helmet.

"You aren't exactly selling it on the dramatic black armor and overkill guns," she said, voice still deceptively mild.

One of the soldiers cocked his head in acknowledgment.

Without warning, Stephanie reached up with a hand and knocked a hole in the wall with her fist. It was wide enough for her head, so she flung herself bodily into the wall, using the nurse as leverage. The result: Stevie went crashing through the wall, and the nurse went flying into the men with guns.

 _Everyone's happy, and we part ways as unlikely friends_ , Stevie thought hysterically, not hesitating at the bright colors and enormous buildings and ducking into an alleyway with no shield, no bra, and no shoes.

 _Damn, running without a bra sucks,_ she mused to herself.

* * *

She ended up at a rape center. They gave her a new (and complete) set of clothes, and a number to call for free counseling. They also checked her for the possibility of a baby (which wasn't one), assured her that there was nothing, and gave her more numbers to other rape victims who were willing to talk about it and help her through it.

 _Counseling?_

Turns out this century is reasonable about people being traumatized by traumatic events. Good for them. Hopefully they have better shrinks.

Since rape and war were two entirely different things, Stevie declined to call any of the numbers. Speaking of calling, _holy moly_ , look at all the phones!

(She revised her awed opinion of them within three minutes spent in Verizon, looking at various phones, looking at apps that wanted personal information. This new century has _no privacy_ , she was finding.)

Stevie found the black market within six hours of being in this new New York City.

("I need papers," she said simply.

"How authentic, and how much are you willing to pay?"

"Authentic enough to stand up to a spy agency looking for anomalies," she said dryly, and laughed at the twitch his eyebrows gave. "I don't have any money, but I'm willing to train ten people everything I know."

"Twenty."

"Thirteen."

"Fifteen."

"Done.")

It ended up taking three months for papers and licenses, so Stevie trained another two people for a place to stay with little to no cameras for four months. Her training them would be done in four or five months total, she guessed, and by the end of it, she would be set up with a job.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

* * *

Stevie met Natalie, looked at her three separate times, and ran after she busted her flour bag open, filling the room with murky white.

She later came back and paid her landlord in cash for both the broken contract and the mess that she left in the room.

Selling her doodles was fun, and it made her money. Paper and charcoal were extremely inexpensive, despite the difference from inflation. It wasn't her main source of income, however—that relied on her skills as an "administrative assistant" to a dental hygienist. It wasn't much, but Stevie was frugal and knew how to save.

"You are a pain to track down," "Natalie" said admiringly over coffee. She hadn't touched hers and neither had Stevie. "Seventy years on ice and you basically vanish after only five hours' worth of introduction."

"The serum helped with a lot," Stevie said. "Learning curve, as well as my body being able to keep up with my mind. Though, I haven't had my period yet, and I'm dreading it."

Natalie blinked twice. "What relevance does that have to do with anything?"

Stevie looked at her dryly, her charcoal-smudged fingers wrapped around the warm cup, even if she'd never drink out of it. "My first was when I was twenty-one, a month and a half after I was injected with the serum. It lasted for six days. I ran a hundred and three degree fever for four of them, and was unconscious for six days after the first day and a half overwhelmed me."

Natalie looked appropriately horrified, and whipped out a notepad, writing several names down.

"This," she said, tapping the first one and sliding the piece of paper over, "is Midol, made specifically for women and our cycles. This is ibuprofen—basically aspirin—and can lower fever and reduce pain. In case you get headaches like someone else I know, this is Excedrin Migraine, which is basically pain killers paired with caffeine to ramp up the effects. I would guess that you'd have to take triple the usual dose for any of them for it to actually help you."

Stevie took the paper and looked at it carefully. "Thanks," she said, smiling. "Hopefully no one knocks and tries to take me to the hospital."

"That would take all the fun out of this," Natalie agreed, a secret smile hovering over her lips.

"Are you ever going to bring your partner to one of our truces?" Stevie asked curiously.

"Please," Natalie scoffed. "I have enough testosterone hovering around me. Let's not ruin this—" she gestured between the two of them, "—with more of it."

Stevie _cackled_. "Peggy would've loved you," she informed the spy.

Natalie just smiled. "By all accounts, she was an amazing Director. I got to meet her once; that woman is _sassy_. They don't put that in the history books."

Stevie grinned. "Why do you think I said that she would've loved you?"

* * *

The shopkeeper had not been expecting two women to break out into an intense and acrobatic fight in the middle of his store, that was for sure, Stevie mused as she grabbed Natalie's ankle and had to use almost all her strength to wrench her leg from around her neck.

"We need some help," Natalie panted after she clawed through the plastic encasing a loaf of bread. (Which, speaking of, what the hell? Wasn't plastic made to be durable? How disappointing.)

"It's not a truce day," Stevie said, hurling a Campbell's soup can at ninety miles an hour at the redhead's sternum.

"No," Natalie agreed, dodging the can and ripping through the cardboard containing a length of extension cords like it was tissue paper and snapped it like a whip, wrapping it around Stevie's left leg painfully, and then yanked. Stevie was thrown on her back, but wrapped her ankle in the cord twice more, then grabbed the corner of an aisle and used it to do a backwards somersault, Natalie letting go of the cord just in time to avoid being yanked onto her front. Stevie landed on her feet, shaking her leg to get rid of the cord and settling into her old, familiar boxing stance. "But the world's working on ending at the moment, so we're kind of pressed for superheroes."

"You still work for those bastards?" Stevie asked nonchalantly as the two women tumbled into an extensive use of martial arts.

"SHIELD are the good guys," she said, like she did every time when Stevie brought them up. "And yeah, I've worked for the bad guys, too, so I actually know what I'm talking about."

"Lying to me and then being surrounded and threatened with automatic guns isn't the best way to introduce oneself as a good guy," Stevie said.

"No, they screwed that one up," Natalie agreed.

"I'm not meeting them on their base," Stevie said flatly.

"You're kind of going to have to," Natalie disagreed. "The rest will be meeting there."

"I'm certain that I can chat with them just as easily over Skype in the middle of Central Park," Stevie said. "Besides, I'm tired enough of testosterone that I've considered asking you out on an actual date to scare off the rest of the suitors. Travelling with thirty-something stinky men in an active warzone takes the romance right out of you."

Natalie broke her hold on Stevie's arms to laugh helplessly. "If I get to suffer through it, Stevie, so do you. And if they do something stupid, I promise that I'll deck Fury _myself_."

* * *

 **Sorry, sorry, I'm prepping for hurricane season and got distracted. Hurricane season is coming early this year, I have a tropical storm working on being overhead in several hours. It's irritating. Enjoy!**

 **-Ruby**


	5. The Avengers pt 1

"It only took you ten hours," Fury groused. Or at least, Stevie presumed that it was Fury, because he fit the description that Natalie told her to a T.

Stevie looked at the spy. "You've been milking this as vacation time, haven't you?"

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," Natalie said cheerfully.

"Yeah, now, you see, that's trouble," said a man with a goatee.

"Mr. Stark!" Stevie said, grinning. "You're a smart man. Do all of womankind a favor and invent a comfortable bra, would you?"

To his credit, he only blinked twice before replying, "That isn't my industry, Captain, but I have been in the role of doing womankind favors before."

Stevie eyed him. "I assume that you have found the one that drives you absolutely mad in every possible way by now, if you're making remarks like that?" She laughed at the disconcerted look on his face. "Don't answer that. You Starks and your emotions. You don't look much like him, but bring up _feelings_ and you have the exact same expression."

"You are quite possibly the only person to have told me that I don't look like Howard," Mr. Stark said, utterly baffled.

She gave him a sweeping glance. "You have the same skin. Similar hands. That's about it."

"Huh. And what was this about Natashalie taking ten hours to track you down?"

"Oh, SHIELD screwed me over and tried to make me believe that it was still 1944 when I woke from the ice," she said casually. "I threatened the nurse, they sent six armed men to threaten me, I broke out, spent five hours looking for the black market, and got myself papers, a job, and off the grid as much as possible. These folks sent Natalie to bring me back."

Stark, a man with glasses and fluffy hair, a blond with medieval armor, and a dark haired woman dressed in a catsuit similar to Natalie's stared at her in disbelief.

"I don't know what their problem was," Stevie said, still very casual. "They could have bought me three cups of Dippin' Dots and a drawing tablet and I would've been happy. Still wouldn't have stayed in their cell-like apartments—don't give me that look, Fury, I'm a woman from the forties who fought on the front lines, I don't take bullshit from anyone." She paused. "And Natalie complained about them over coffee, so."

Stark broke, bending over and silently laughing until he straightened and let out loud guffaws. He finally stopped laughing and clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Stevie, I just realized where Aunt Peggy got her sense of humor."

"Once you got rid of the broomstick taped to her spine, she could drop some zingers that could make you spit out your drink," Stevie agreed. "And she would do it totally deadpan, too, like she didn't actually know what she was saying."

"Can we _focus_ on the problem at hand?" Fury demanded.

"Sure!" Stevie said, plopping down in a chair. She tapped on the table twice and a window popped up. "Oh, crap."

They all looked at her. "The Cube," said the guy with the glasses.

Stevie scowled, her broad shoulders stiffening. "You say that you found this? When?"

"Howard Stark fished it out of the ocean while he was looking for you," Fury said. "Over twenty years ago."

If anything, Stevie scowled harder.

"Anything you want to share with the class, Captain?"

"Other than that you should've left it in the ocean? And that I'm seriously wondering if you're HYDRA after all and that Natalie happens to be delusional? And that if you aren't, I'll still call you an imbecilic gecko? Nope. Not a thing."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Stark swallow a laugh and mouth 'imbecilic gecko' to himself. Natalie rolled her eyes.

From there, it devolved into a discussion of something science-y, of which Stevie couldn't follow whatsoever.

"So let me get this straight, and correct me if I'm wrong," Stevie said. "This lunatic had access to this thing through forces that _we don't understand_ and opened a portal with this thing while you were fiddling with it—something that we know is incredibly dangerous, but other than that, absolutely nothing. So you guys—" she jerked a thumb at Stark and Glasses, "are saying that now that he has _physical_ access to it, he now has something that acts like a more versatile HYDRA weapon, kidnaps probably the only scientist in the world capable of creating a portal with alien tech, and high tails it out of a collapsing base with at least one scientist and a notable assassin." She turned around to look at Fury incredulously. "Have I gotten anything wrong yet?"

"No," Glasses said instead. He looked entertained.

"So now that said lunatic has access to the glowing cube of radiation, he's going to open up a portal—which has been stabilized by iridium, so it can stay open infinitely without collapsing like a house of cards in a hurricane. Now, I don't know how much went down in the history books, but the last time someone got ahold of the glowing cube of radiation, he was a lunatic, and he tried to take over the world." She leaned back and ticked off her fingers: "He has means, he presumably has motive, so the question is when and where he's going to open this portal. And Natalie, you people might be the good guys, but SHIELD has the brains of a bent doornail."

The amazon of woman stood and _loomed_ over Fury. Words like _delicate_ and _feminine_ never so ill-suited a woman before.

"Let's get something straight," she said lowly, her voice dropping to a deeper register. "You want to save the world from a megalomaniac with _magic_. I want to save the world from a megalomaniac with _magic_. We happen to have similar goals. This doesn't mean that I agree with you, your way of achieving those goals, your resources, your ideas, _or_ your fashion choices." She gave him a sweeping, obvious glance. "And that says something, coming from a girl who fought a war in what might has well have been neon colors. _Am. I. Clear?_ "

"Captain Rogers, unless you're a sudden expert in megalomaniacs with _magic_ , would you mind stepping aside and let me do my fuckin' job?" Fury asked, not batting an eye at the national icon.

"I _do_ , in fact, mind," she said. "Mostly because the last megalomaniac with _magic_ got put down because of me. I just got done with a war because of him less than a year ago, to me. I don't exactly feel like letting this guy start World War _Three_."

"And what do you actually propose to do, Captain Rogers?" Fury asked, looking like he was being torn between shrugging his shoulders in acknowledgement, grumbling, and plain curiosity.

"Nothing more than what you were probably already planning," she admitted. "Let the scientists—" she waved at Glasses and Stark "work their science that might as well be magic, because I certainly don't understand it." Glasses smirked wryly, and Stark grinned. "Then, once you get said megalomaniac, set Natalie on him. I know that I'm basically nothing but the brawn, but you guys had twenty-something years to study this, and what have you learned?" She paused, waiting. "That was an actual question, please respond."

"Not much," Fury said.

Stevie pursed her lips. "Then unless you trust Stark to take a crack at it without destroying the world, I would chuck it into the Mariana Trench in a box that will keep it from broadcasting whatever the hell it broadcasts, wipe its existence from the record, and pass out NDAs like beads on Mardi Gras."

"We can't do that, Captain Rogers," Fury said.

"Yes, you most certainly can," Stevie disagreed. "You just don't want to, because you want more _toys_." Her eyes went gray and flinty. She jerked up her pant leg and brought out a clearly alien gun, and tossed it to Stark. "Like that."

A dozen guns were drawn and aimed at Stevie.

Natalie buried her head in her hands.

"Okay, wait," Stark interrupted, holding up his hands—one with the alien energy gun—in a standard peace position. "Hold your horses. She could have gone about it more diplomatically, but Captain Rogers kinda has a point. There's no need for something this advanced on a battlefield. Plus, um, this looks like my father's schematics for old HYDRA weapons."

Stevie linked her hands behind her back, arching an eyebrow at Fury.

"Will wonders never cease," Fury said sarcastically. "It looks like a HYDRA gun because it _is_ a HYDRA gun. It gets within thirty feet of the Tesseract and it starts charging inexplicably. Why the _hell_ do you think that it was in the research facility rather than the _armory?!_ "

"Why the _hell_ do you think I grabbed that one rather than the _others_?" Stevie shot back, mimicking his phrasing. "Because I recognized it for what it was, and then you had at least eight others that I _didn't_. I'm a soldier, Fury, and a damn terrible one at that, but even a terrible soldier knows not to pick up something that they don't recognize."

"Not to interrupt the entertainment," Glasses said mildly, causing everyone to shift, "But I think Loki got picked up by facial recognition." He tilted his fluffy head towards the bank of computers on one side.

Fury sighed and rubbed his temples. "To hell with it—Rogers, go suit up and bug someone else."

Stevie bit back a grin. "Yes, sir."

* * *

"Stevie," Natasha called over the roar of the engine, wrestling with the controls. "Why are you a 'damn terrible' soldier?"

"You know the thing that I'm most famous for?" Stevie yelled. "It's disobeying orders, going behind enemy lines, and taking excessively long to get back to where I started. It's not being a bigot, being female, and being successful through whatever means necessary."

Natasha laughed. "Fair enough!"

* * *

Loki packed a wallop, Stevie thought, nursing several rapidly-healing cracked ribs and a deep bruise over the same area. _But, unfortunately, not nearly as much of one as his pursuer_.

Her arms ached in a way that they hadn't since the thirties, when she'd tried to disguise herself as a boy (not for the first _or_ the last time) and go down and work at the docks with Bucky. She didn't even make it three hours before she lost her job due to her asthma, and her arms ached for days afterward from the heavy lifting.

Thor, she learned his name was, was told to be generally pretty laidback, if fairly oblivious. Stevie saw none of that now. She saw anger and guilt and sadness, along with the same too-wise eyes that Bucky's sisters wore once the depression hit. There had been mistakes made, and the repercussions of it were hitting him like a socked brick to the eye.

"The Lady Warrior tells me that you are a troublemaker, much as my brother," Thor said glumly. "Do you have insight to his mind?"

Stevie kind of wanted to be offended, but she gently explained to him that it was unlikely for two troublemakers to be alike. "I also understand that there are cultural differences between us and Asgard," she added. Stevie huffed a laugh. "In fact, there are severe cultural differences from when I came from to the present day. And something else: I don't generally cause trouble unless I or someone I love is already _in_ trouble, or I am avoiding trouble of malicious intent."

"From _when_...?" Thor asked, trailing off.

"I had an accident and ended up in ice," she said. "Because of my healing, I was kept alive for decades until someone found the plane I crashed. I woke up six months ago. I understand that your people have much longer lifespans than us?"

Thor nodded.

"The difference is about a lifetime of a human," she said. "I imagine that a full Asgardian lifetime in the past would be much different than the Asgard of today?"

"I understand," Thor said, smiling ruefully. "And indeed, it would be."

Loki, gagged and chained once more, watched the exchange.

"Lady Natasha said that you caused trouble earlier on this day," Thor said. "Why?"

"You live with a troublemaker yourself, so you have probably been tricked at one point or another," Stevie said slowly. Thor nodded. "When I crashed, it was violent and frightening. I believed that I would die. When I woke, my surroundings had been engineered to think that no time nor not much time had passed—but I could see through the illusion. I thought that I had been captured by the enemy."

Thor winced.

"Yes," Stevie agreed. "I broke out, and later found out that they were the good guys who have flaws. One of them was working with my old enemy's weapons, as well as alien energy sources that have never been used for benign reasons."

"You fear betrayal," Thor rumbled.

Stevie considered it. "No, not really. It's not betrayal if I never trusted them in the first place, is it? No, I fear that one day they'll poke something that shouldn't be poked in pursuit of SCIENCE! Then the world gets blown up, which won't be fun."

"The dealings with the Tesseract was what brought the attention of the realms," Thor said.

Stevie paused for a moment, and then took a deep breath to refrain from screaming in frustration, tearing her hair out, or doing something else along those lines.


	6. The Avengers pt 2

Such as battles are—that is to say, adrenaline-warped, fear-filled, noisy, and chaotic—Stevie hardly remembered the majority of it not even five minutes afterward. When asked, she replied, "Ma'am, I'd love to give you a blow-by-blow as mighty as it is humorous—" (as Thor was doing several yards away to a half-manic reporter) "—but once you've punched one Chitauri, you've punched them all."

(Edited out was, "…punched them all, like aluminum armor over half-dried cockroach guts.")

"Stevie, stop terrorizing the reporters," Natasha (her real name, go figure) said, a slight smile tugging on one side of her lips.

"If they want the blow-by-blow, they should go to Thor. He's got eyes in the sky," Stevie said in response.

"I think what you really want is FOX News blowing a gasket when they realize that Thor's an actual alien prince formerly worshipped as a god, and could arguably still be classified as one," Natasha countered.

"Oh no," Stevie deadpanned. "You caught me and foiled my dastardly plans."

Natasha's not-smile got bigger, and the reporter flat-out laughed.

* * *

On a completely unrelated note, shawarma is absolutely disgusting. Stevie ate it anyway; she was starving.

* * *

For lack of anything better to do with him, Loki was slapped with magic-inhibiting cuffs that Thor had apparently had on him since he touched down on the Quinjet two days before. The dark-haired god was then tied—enthusiastically, thanks to Clint—to one of the oddest-looking chairs Steve had ever seen.

"It's ergonomic," Banner said, when he saw here eyeing it skeptically. She then gave him an equally skeptical look. "It means that it's good for your spine. It's also reinforced with some of the strongest metals on the planet. Tony had JARVIS cook it up in his fabricator."

Since Stevie's knowledge of metals was limited to tin, rust, and vibranium, she decided to take his word for it.

"I don't trust SHIELD," Tony said at one point, when they were discussing where to keep chair-bound Loki.

In accordance to the rules, when someone says something that you emphatically agree with, you fist-bump them. Tony and Stevie fist-bumped enthusiastically.

"Just how long have you been here, Rogers?" Tony asked curiously.

"What, SHIELD didn't tell you about the shoddy '40s-era hospital that convinced me with a single breath that I'd been captured by the enemy?" Stevie asked innocently.

Tony stared at the woman who was a solid six-to-eight inches taller than him blankly. After a moment, he said: "JARVIS, when you have a moment and SHIELD isn't in a state of emergency for longer than twelve hours, do something truly horrible to them."

"That will be quite a while, then, Sir."

"Spend that time plotting."

"I shall plot most evilly, Sir."

"JARVIS, you are the greatest," Stevie said through her giggles. Honestly, even Loki looked mildly impressed.

(In the end, it wouldn't matter. SHIELD would be torn to the ground by vengeful supersoldiers and resentful assassins within a matter of months.)

Natasha said, "Stevie's led SHIELD on a wild goose chase for the past five and a half months. She broke out of the facility in a matter of minutes, and in a matter of hours, she disappeared completely."

Tony, Banner, and Clint looked suitably impressed. Thor looked like he knew he should be impressed, but was not entirely certain of _why_.

"I am curious, how did you manage to disappear so thoroughly?" Clint asked.

Stevie arched an eyebrow. "There's going to the ground, and then there's going to the underground."

"You didn't," Clint said disbelievingly.

"I missed something important, I hate doing that," Tony said. "What did I miss?"

" _Captain America_ became a mercenary as bribery, threat, or payment for something," Clint said incredulously.

Stevie looked unimpressed. "Please don't get hypocritical."

"Stevie, stop teasing him," Natasha said.

"Okay, fine," she agreed. "I didn't become a mercenary. I just trained them."

Tony coughed. "What exactly did you train them in exchange for?"

"Two months' apartment rent without cameras on the immediate street, papers to stand up to an international spy agency's nosiness, and a historian and therapist who kept no computer records and could have their silence on my identity bought for as long as necessary," Stevie said easily.

"I forgot how well being a mercenary paid," Clint said.

"You don't know the greatest part, either," Stevie laughed.

"Do I want to know?" Banner muttered.

"You do, actually," Stevie said.

Banner paused. "Okay, now I'm curious."

Stevie leaned forward. "I'm not a mercenary. There's only one thing that I can do that I can teach someone that can't be taught in basic training in the U.S. Army, and that's eyeballing the crap out of ricocheting objects."

There was a stunned pause, and then Natasha surprised them all by laughing loud and hard.

"You're a piece of work," Tony said admiringly. "How mad were your employers?"

"Livid, until they brought in an actual mercenary for me to fight and the mercenary stepped back within thirty seconds and said, 'Precision and basic Army training, just faster than most can keep up with. Why?'"

Clint joined Natasha and _cackled_.

Stevie simply smiled.

* * *

She spent a week doing nothing but eating (mostly pancakes, as most of the other foods she didn't even know what they could possibly be used for), sleeping (in a cot in one of the conference rooms in Stark Tower), and drawing. Then she contacted a t-shirt company and told them who she was, and offered to pay for several hundred thousand of six stylized shirts: one light blue with the helmet of Iron Man, one light green with a cartoonish and darker green fist, one dark blue with her shield, one red with Thor's hammer, one purple with a nocked and drawn bow, and one black with a simple red hourglass. On the back of each shirt was the white stylized A that had come to symbolize the Avengers as a whole.

The t-shirt company made them for free, and Stevie said thank-you in the form of good advertisement: lettering at the bottom of each shirt telling the world that the company made them for free to help raise funds for rebuilding New York City.

Stevie got in contact with Pepper, who promptly gave her the addresses of all of the Stark Industries sites, big or small, and told her to divvy up the shirts as she saw fit.

Turns out, four hundred thousand shirts lasted all of half a day before they were gone, at twelve dollars apiece. Stevie donated every last bit of the 4.8 million dollars that she'd raised to the state with the stipulation of it being used for recovery from major disasters.

When she visited the website again to order more shirts, there was a banner on the page:

 **Individual t-shirts will temporarily be more expensive. Avengers t-shirts are regularly priced, with all proceeds being donated to the State of New York to help with the rebuilding. We have currently raised $ 1,217,076 for the State of New York.**

Stevie gleefully ordered another five hundred thousand shirts, and had them shipped to all the Stark Industries sites.

 **We have currently raised $ 7,218,612 for the State of New York.**

Not half an hour later, Pepper poked her head into the conference room that was serving as her sleeping room. "Stevie?"

"Hiya, Pepper."

"I need your bank account. As we make back the money, we'll give it back to you so you can order more. Sound fair?"

Stevie nodded. "Extremely," she said, and rattled off the account.

"Great. Here's your phone. It has my number and Tony's number already in it, so if you need anything, call. Also, I'll probably end up calling you, so don't freak out when it makes a loud racket."

Stevie nodded, and caught the older woman before she dashed away once more. "Pepper? Tony did some of the heavy lifting for the Tower with the Iron Man suit on, right?"

Pepper arched an eyebrow. "Just how did you hear about this?"

JARVIS was a horrible gossip with those he deemed trustworthy, and "shipped" Pepper and Tony so much it was ridiculous, but Stevie wasn't about to rat him out.

"Tony gets on tangents, occasionally."

Pepper snorted. "Just occasionally? Yes, he did some of the heavy lifting. Why?"

"I was going to go out and help move rubble. I bet Iron Man and I can lift the larger items with a lot of precision to avoid damaging anything underneath."

"In case there are people underneath," she said, her smile compassionate. "Of course, I'll make sure that JARVIS lets Tony know now and then remind him at…say, two o'clock tomorrow? For an hour and a half?"

Stevie privately thought that she could go longer, but Tony was a busy man with a company to help run and physically rebuild, as well as dealing with politicians left, right, and center. She nodded.

"I'll call the teams," Pepper said briskly. "Then I'll let you know where they want you two."

"Yes, ma'am," Stevie said, smiling a bit.

Pepper hesitated, her small smile falling off her face. "Stevie…if you find someone…you weren't here for 9/11, you didn't look out your boss's window to suddenly see the first World Trade Center tower go down in a heap of steel, glass, and dust. It's going to be…terrifying and heartwrenching."

Stevie's lips thinned. "So was liberating a few concentration camps between HYDRA facilities."

* * *

Stevie and Tony met with a SWAT team member with a German Shepard at his side in Lower East Central. One of the behemoth alien carriers clipped the upper south end of one of the old-style towers, the ones where they looked like children's bricks rather than coming to points—and ended up knocking the entire upper half into the street, where it collapsed into large chunks of concrete.

There were survivors, the SWAT member said. They knew that for a fact, he said, because one woman had a Starkphone and called her father, who was in the National Guard, who alerted the rescue teams, who sent SWAT, who have been excavating the area since the battle against the aliens ended.

Tony preened. His phone survived an alien invasion and a building collapse, and was still good enough to get signal through several feet of concrete, steel, and glass.

Stevie knew that _she_ was impressed.

"You make awesome phones," she said.

"Of course I do, you just missed it, being a Capsicle."

"I'm probably never going to buy one, but I can definitely see the usefulness in emergency situations like this," Stevie continued.

The voice modulator made a half-static noise that was probably Tony huffing. Stevie bit back a grin.

"We want you to start with this slab—"

"Cap, why don't we work on the pocket of air that we're standing on?"

Stevie pulled out the phone that Pepper had given her. JARVIS sent her a picture of a three-dimensional model of the rubble, complete with slabs, pockets of air, and thermal imaging of the people underneath. She showed it to the SWAT member. "Iron Man, that sounds like a great idea."

Stevie grabbed a flat shovel and proceeded to use it like a broom.

After fifteen minutes of digging and vaporizing the rubble, Tony took over, carefully lasering a very small hole through some rocks.

"Hello?" Stevie called.

"Be careful!" a man cried. "The part that you're standing on is about to go!"

"How big is the space?" Stevie asked.

"About ten feet wide, maybe five feet tall."

Stevie looked considering at the rubble behind her, then at the rubble below her. Then she looked at Iron Man, and held up her arm. "Sir, I would get to the opposite side of the space. I'm going to trigger the slide, and you'll have a sturdy slab of concrete over you that won't budge an inch."

She waited. "Are you on the opposite side?"

"Yes."

Stevie jumped, Iron Man took to the air. Stevie came down, Iron Man kept her from falling into the space by wrapping a dead gauntlet around her outstretched arm and keeping her in the air. When the rubble stopped moving, Stevie was set down and helped the man and his son squirm through the foot-and-a-half wide crack between the rubble and the slab of concrete.

The man's eyebrows suddenly became one with his hair when he caught sight of Steve's luridly colored outfit. "Captain America?"

"Iron Man!" the kid squealed, hugging the titanium-gold armor like it's as cuddly as a stuffed bunny. For all Stevie knew, it might as well be, in comparison to cold concrete. Clean tracks on the boy's otherwise dusty and dirty face told her that he'd been crying.

"Cute kid," Tony said, flipping the faceplate up. He shot a glance at Stevie, a vaguely _HELP_ look, but Stevie wasn't any better with small children.

She was just glad that the kid hadn't chosen _her_ to latch onto.

* * *

They moved heavy slabs of concrete. They freed a few more people. Stevie got a lift on Air Stark to the other place that the rescue teams really wanted heavy lifting and precision and thought that they could do within Pepper Potts's timeline of an hour and a half.

Stevie ended up holding up a _very heavy_ slab of concrete on her shoulders a lá Atlas while more than twenty people fled the imminently-collapsing pocket and Tony was inside, melting rock and flash-freezing it to keep it from altogether collapsing while people limped or were dragged/carried/helped out.

(Tony later informed her that if she practiced, she could blast straight past human limits with no speed limit posted. The several-tonned slab of concrete definitely confirmed that.)

Pepper Potts was right, per usual. By the time the hour and a half was up, Stevie was exhausted, and dragged Tony to a pizza place that had been there since before _Stevie_ had been born.

#HeavyLifting trended in the top ten for the next three months.

#NewYorkStyle trended off and on in the top twenty-five for the next decade, though, and it wasn't just referring to their cheesecake or pizza.

* * *

The next day, Stevie set up another hour and a half appointment with the rescue teams, and this time, she brought Natasha with her.

Natasha is incredibly bendy.

Natasha very much enjoyed the #BlackContortionist that trended for a while.

However, Natasha cackled at the uproar when Stevie took Thor out with her the next day, and the two of them powered through rubble like it was no heavier than a regular Jenga game. #NewYorkJenga and #SuperheroJenga kept her entertained for months, long after it stopped trending.

* * *

When the city was in not-immediately-going-to-self-destruct mode, they eagerly sent Thor and his mad little brother off-world. Central Park was a great place for a teleportation site, apparently.

Who knew?

Steve Rogers certainly didn't.


	7. The Winter Soldier pt 1

**Warnings for the f-bomb being dropped a few times.**

* * *

By the time Stevie got down to the workshop, the place had gone to hell. The apparent intruder—singular—was small, probably about the same size that Stevie had been before the serum. The man—she assumed he was fully-grown and not twelve—fought like something between a wild animal and a Russian ballerina. He and Natasha were locked in a vicious battle that had taken out at least three of Tony's worktables.

They broke apart for five seconds, and Stevie could see the anguish in his eyes. "Natenshka," he whispered. "What did they _do_ to you?"

Natasha went rigid. "How do you know that name?"

Stevie was at the right angle to see his eyes go wide with hope. "You remember James." At no sign of recognition, he tried, "Yasha? You remember Yasha?"

Natasha _pounced_. There was no other word for it. She crouched a minute amount and sailed over the workbench between them like a puma exploding over a boulder. She bowled over the man, rolling them until they were smack against one of the glass cases that held who-knew-what and proceeded to slowly strangle the man.

"I will _not_ ," Natasha panted, enraged. "I will _not_ go back to the Red Room. The only capacity that you will have me is my dead body, and not even that if I can arrange it."

"He escaped," the man wheezed. "They did things worse to him—he was an American soldier—Natenshka—"

Natasha kneed the man in the stomach and let go of his throat. The man gasped for a moment and coughed. "Talk," she commanded.

"He was an American soldier in World War II," the sandy-haired man said. "He and most of his regiment were captured by Hydra, and they experimented on him. Official story is that he managed to break out, break out the prisoners, and died while covering the back of someone else. What actually happened was that Hydra managed to capture him again, and used electricity to wipe his memories of his previous self. The method was unstable because the cocktail that they gave him _worked_ and made him…some kind of superhuman."

"A supersoldier," Natasha said.

"A superassassin," the man said. "Do you remember?"

"What's his actual name?" Natasha demanded.

"Barnes," the man said. "James Barnes."

There was a long pause, and then Natasha turned at looked at Stevie, her green eyes huge and puzzled.

Stevie managed to choke out, "James _Buchanan_ Barnes?"

And then her green eyes turned horrified.

The man looked startled. "Uh, yeah. How'd you know that? And, uh, did someone yank you out of a Marvel comic book? And feminized you, somewhere along the line?"

"What's _your_ name?" Natasha asked.

He looked at Natasha, and then at Stevie. "Steve Rogers. I'm Agent Rogers of MIRROR."

Natasha sat back on her heels, looking at him with frank bemusement. "Stark, you can come out of hiding now. Come fix this mess."

Tony slowly stood, cobbled-together repulsors glowing softly on his palms with the metal frame and wires winding their way up his arms and to the reactor in his chest.

He managed to sum up what they were all thinking with two words: "Well, fuck."

* * *

"What's 'well, fuck'?" the male Rogers questioned hurriedly as Natasha hauled him up by one arm. "Having Einstein-Rosen bridges spontaneously opening might be 'well, fuck' for the rest of the world, but for me it's just another Tuesday, so either this is a lot weirder for you people—which I doubt, because you have a real-life and feminized Captain America and possibly a cyborg of Tony Stark—or there's something that I'm missing."

"Kid, you're missing a lot of things," Tony said bleakly.

The male Rogers bristled. "Excuse you, I'm twenty-four, not twelve."

Stevie rubbed her forehead absently. "Steve," she said loudly, making sure that the two didn't devolve into squabbling. "What year were you born?"

"1988," he said. "Why?"

Stevie said some words that had Tony's eyebrows flying into his hair. "Because," she said, "my name is Stephanie Rogers, and Natasha doesn't know who you are because she's actually never met _you,_ because I am you from an apparently vastly different dimension."

"Is it Thursday?" Tony muttered.

"No, it's Tuesday," Steve said.

"It's actually Saturday," Natasha said.

"What year were you born?" the male Rogers asked the female.

Stevie glanced at Natasha, and then Tony. "1920."

Steve gaped at her for a moment, and then turned to Natasha. "Nineteen- _twenty?_ "

"I ended up joining the Army in 1942, spent three months in Basic and then got turned into a supersoldier in the basement of somewhere in Brooklyn," she said mildly. "Then I was dubbed 'Captain America'. Which is apparently a comic book series in your world?"

"It's a comic book series, here, too," Tony said. "Only it was based off of you, and not just someone's imagination."

"Why MIRROR?" Stevie asked. "Why does one universe have SHIELD and you have MIRROR?"

Steve glanced between her and Tony. "Uh…well, we had SHIELD, until about two years ago. Natenshka and I—well, my Natenshka—we ended up burning it to the ground to expose HYDRA."

Stevie jerked, goosebumps rising on her forearms. " _Excuse me?_ "

He shifted away from her. "Yeeeaah, that was kind of our reaction. Turns out that HYDRA was a hell of a lot sneakier than anyone suspected. It was Operation: Paperclip that did it, back after the war."

"Oh," Tony said, his eyes lighting up with understanding.

"Operation: Paperclip conscripted Nazi scientists to work for the British or Americans," Natasha explained to Stevie.

"Apparently, the Stark of my universe had some inkling about SHIELD's shadiness, because as soon as Natenshka and I brought SHIELD down, he had SWORD up and running within the month. After being a _scarily_ good Director and making sure that Earth still survived a few more times, he passed it over to Phil, who renamed it MIRROR."

"Someone likes Coldplay too much," Tony said.

Steve shot him a smirk. "That was _at least_ a quarter of the reason why he named it such."

"I don't understand the reference," Stevie admitted.

"Coldplay's a band," Steve said. "One of their song's lyrics goes: _be my mirror, my sword and shield_. And, okay, I'm sorry—but my alternate self is _Captain America?_ What the hell? Are you yankin' my chain?"

Stevie looked down at herself, decked out in full body armor. "No, not to my knowledge. Personally, I find it amusing that my alternate self brought down HYDRA without being a lab rat. Especially when it was in SHIELD, of which I've never gotten along with."

"Oh, no, I was a lab rat," Steve disagreed. "Asthma, heart murmur, scoliosis, two different immunodeficiency diseases and a list of allergies quite literally as long as my arm."

Natasha and Tony both whipped their heads to Stevie to see if she had been the same.

"Of course, you're a guy, you got lucky," Stevie said dryly. "Did you have rheumatic fever or was that just me?"

Natasha's lips pursed, which was as good as a full-body cringe from anyone else.

"Oh, Lord," Steve swore, groaning, which Stevie took as a yes. "How the hell did _you_ survive that in the mid-thirties?"

Stevie smiled tightly. "Bucky Barnes."

"Was he a nurse in this universe?" Steve asked, puzzled.

"He was my best friend and he refused to let me die," Stevie said baldly. "Even when the priest came and gave me the Last Rites."

Tony looked at her up and down. "I'm sorry, I can't see that."

Stevie smirked. "I used to be shorter than you by about four inches, and looked more like bones covered in taut skin. I'd get sick every time the temperature dropped below seventy, and winter was a Russian Roulette of illness: pneumonia, bronchitis, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, flu, mono, polio, measles, chicken pox. Sometimes it would be two or three back to back. One winter was pneumonia only to turn right around with scarlet fever."

"Fifteen years old?" Steve asked.

Stevie nodded.

"And you didn't have the pills," Steve said. "Jesus Christ, how _did_ you survive without modern medicine?"

"Pills?" Tony demanded.

"If you get scarlet fever nowadays," Steve said, "you take a series of pills for five days, and it's gone. Unless you have severe immunodeficiencies, you don't have to worry about relapsing with rheumatic fever, which can and does damage your heart. She didn't have the pills, and her immune system—even if it hadn't already been compromised with the immunodeficiencies—would have been compromised anyway because she just got done with pneumonia. The illness itself can take months to run its course with another year for full recovery. Scarlet fever should have killed her within three days." He hesitated. "A good analogy would be that she survived Bird Flu only to have come down with Ebola."

The color drained out of Natasha's face.

Tony said some emphatic words that should not be repeated to small children.

"Like I said," Stevie said with a tight smile, "Bucky refused to let me die."

"That doesn't work like that, though," Tony protested.

"Then _you_ find a medical explanation for me," Stevie shot back. "And good God damnit, if Bucky's still alive as a brainwashed Red Room soldier, you can ask _him_ , because by the time that it got that bad, I was past delirious and straight into comatose."

* * *

"So we have multiple problems," Bruce summed up later in a meeting with the other Avengers.

"Is he supposed to be the Hulk?" MIRROR-Steve whispered to Natasha.

"We need to contact Jane Foster and Reed Richards—"

Tony groaned theatrically and Natasha whispered back, "Yes. Why?"

"—to get this guy back to where he came from," Bruce said.

"I know that I fell through the rabbit hole, but I didn't expect to end up in a Marvel comic book," Steve whispered.

"Then we have the problem of said guy bringing really disturbing information," Tony said.

"And he's Iron Man? Is it strange that I can actually see that?" Steve whispered some more.

"Yes," Natasha muttered. "To both."

"We have the maybe-infestation of HYDRA into SHIELD, which JARVIS is looking into right now," Tony said. "Then we have Wonder Woman's romance of the ages being murder-ized." He stopped, and looked thoughtful. "Can that be an appropriate nickname since Diana's romance was with a guy named Steve who blew up _his_ plane? No, different nickname."

"Not applicable anyway since we were never together," Stevie said dryly.

Tony frowned. "That can't be. Dad told me stories about you two living up to the Howling Commando's name."

"You know what I did when he was drafted?" Stevie asked. "I shut myself in my room for six hours and cried. He sat outside my door and fell backwards when I opened it. Then I told him that if he died, I'd besmirch his name and tell everyone that we had wild and passionate sex out of wedlock, and then I'd bury him with a Yankees ballcap and tell everyone that he was a fan. And you know what? The fact that Howard told you about that was gratifying, and Bucky's sisters buried a casket with only a Yankees ballcap in it."

"Tell him the other part of it," Natasha said.

Stevie looked at her, surprised. "How do you know about the other part of it?"

"Yasha—James, apparently—got into trouble on a mission that I was blonde for. I broke in and managed to rescue him and he started laughing and said, 'You weren't kidding about the one-woman army part of our deal, huh?'" She paused. "Obviously, we never made such a deal. When he recovered, he couldn't remember what or who he was referring to."

"Cognitive recalibration," Clint said dryly. "I guess they didn't hit him hard enough in the head, Tasha."

Stevie barked a broken laugh. "I told him if he was only faking, I'd personally be his one-woman army and get him out. Which is why I became Captain America for real, not Showgirl America, with Azzano and setting the remains of the 107th and several other divisions from four different countries on the base."

Clint whistled.

"You should have seen it," Stevie laughed, tears streaming down her face. "A fucking _tank_ was flipped. Half the east wing was blown out completely, and I was picking my way across Nazi bodies killed in increasingly creative ways with Bucky on my shoulders. He had a gun, I had this little tin foil shield that had saved my life four times already. Then I had to round everyone else up, and they had scattered in every direction imaginable, including up. I ended up coaxing one soldier down from a fifty-foot pine tree with food like a feral cat from the docks."

Pepper Potts stepped in and plonked a mug of steaming hot chocolate down in front of her, then wrapped the woman that was twice her size in a bear hug of epic proportions. Stevie shuddered once, then gathered herself. Pepper produced a handkerchief from nowhere, handed it to Stevie, and took control of the meeting.

"JARVIS is currently looking into American SHIELD bases for traces of HYDRA, but I've also updated FRIDAY and HORTON on the situation and set them on the rest of the world," she said. She tapped the table twice, and a world map filled with pale blue dots was shown. Slowly, some of the dots turned green or yellow. "Green is definitely no HYDRA involvement, yellow is maybe or traces of HYDRA, red is definitive HYDRA involvement. Blue dots have yet to be gotten to. It's reasonable to assume that if HYDRA exists, per our guest, once they find something, I've set STITCH on invading the servers and finding the Winter Soldier."

"You got STITCH out?" Tony asked, eyebrows raised.

"Are FRIDAY, HORTON, and STITCH all AIs?" Bruce asked Tony, incredulous.

"Yes and they are," Pepper said, answering each question. "FRIDAY is my secretary and digital bodyguard, actually. HORTON helps run the small, day-to-day things that the company needs, everything from ordering coffee and Post-Its to catching the attention of a superior in the event that something life-threatening is about to go. STITCH has not been in use since the last time Tony got kidnapped, since he's basically meant for searching for specific people and destroying anything potentially useful that the captors might use. The first time a dot turns red, STITCH is going to coordinate with whoever labeled it as such, find the reason for it being red, and dive into it."

She paused. "I've left Dr. Foster a message with her 'not-intern' and set up a meeting with Reed Richards," she paused, checked her watch, "three and a half hours from now. I've also yelled at the sky to Heimdall, but I don't really know how far that will get me."

Natasha smiled.

"I have a meeting with the Secretary of Treasury in four hours, so I need to go now. But—Stevie."

The blonde looked at her, and Pepper grasped one of her hands tightly. "If he's there to be found, we'll find him. Promise."


	8. The Winter Soldier pt 2

Fifteen minutes after the first red dot appeared, JARVIS made a startled, alarmed noise, so human that everyone looked up at the ceiling and tensed.

"J?" Tony asked slowly.

"Sir," JARVIS responded immediately. "Sir, I do not know what to do. My protocols do not allow me to make a decision."

Tony arched an eyebrow. "We haven't had this problem in years, JARVIS, just what did you find?"

"JARVIS, belay that," Stevie said. "What are your choices, and why do your protocols not allow you to do either?"

"Sir told me to relay everything I deem of importance to him, but my protocols are to keep him from harm."

Tony inhaled once and groped for a chair to sink into. "My parents. Jarvis. Isn't it?"

There was an extremely long pause, and then, very apologetically, JARVIS said, "Yes, Sir."

"Fuck," Tony breathed. "You're right, J, don't show that to me."

"Tony?" Bruce asked.

"The Winter Soldier assassinated his parents," Natasha said flatly.

"And Jarvis by association," Tony said. "Cap, Stevie…he knew Howard pretty well. What if there's not enough of him to save?"

There was another long pause, and then Stevie stuttered out, "Th-then we p-put him down. Wi-with kindness, if possible."

Natasha clutched Stevie's hands in her own. "There's not going to be much at first, if there's any. Wait a week, until he's been out of cryostasis for a long enough time for the healing factor to kick in. You might see…more."

"He won't be the same," Clint said. "You know that, right? He'll never be the same after seventy years of brainwashing and torture, no matter the healing factor."

Stevie nodded silently. Then:

"Guys, how are we going to hold him?" Bruce asked.

Tony snorted a bit. "Hey, do you mind if we rent out your room?"

"Not at all."

* * *

It didn't actually take STITCH long to locate the Winter Soldier. Debating on how to get in was a bigger question. Getting through over a dozen security levels, both physical and digital, and only half of which legally existed was a challenge.

But not much of one, once they decided that coming in like a bull through the china shop wasn't going to make much of a difference, considering that they would be coming _out_ like a bull through the china shop regardless of the method of entry.

"It makes it a difference of minutes between when HYDRA realizes that we've caught on," Clint eventually summed up. "I say we blow through the place, and anyone actively in our way is a bad guy. Anyone in the way but trying to get out of it is a confused and alarmed agent."

"Fair enough," Tony said. "Stevie and I at the front, Clint and Tasha wherever the hell they wanna be, and Bruce in the back as backup in case the Hulk is needed?"

"Who's going to be flying the Quinjet?" Clint asked. "Actually, _I'm_ flying the Quinjet. I'm not much use in hallways. If necessary, I can provide a quick getaway with the Quinjet."

"Okay, suit up, let's go," Stevie said, clapping her hands.

They scattered.

What followed was the most terrifyingly efficient takedown of all of SHIELD's history, and possibly in all of HYDRA's history, too. Tony and Steve kept it brutally non-lethal, with Natasha electrocuting anyone who tried to clean up. Bruce wandered along a little ways behind them, smiling cheerily at bewildered and alarmed SHIELD agents and managing to alarm them even more.

When they got into the more restricted areas, they encountered more resistance. Kicking in doors arbitrarily, since there were no cameras or labels in this area for any of the AIs to direct them towards, Stevie evidently kicked open the wrong one.

Why?

Because all of a sudden, Stevie was on the floor with a shining metal hand wrapped around her throat and her thighs bracketed by calves clothed in reinforced black leather.

 _How the hell does he move in LEATHER?_ Stevie wondered errantly, before managing to tuck a leg under the man's chest and push him off of her through extensive use of brute force.

"Crap!" Tony yelped, jumping out of the way of flying bodies.

The man rolled into a crouched position, obviously sizing her up again, and Stevie got her first clear look at his face.

"Bucky," she said softly.

An eyebrow quirked. "Who the hell is Bucky?"

Then he launched himself back at her, and she gasped out her answer in between dodges and attempted punches: "He's been—" she ducked "—my best—" she lunged with a punch, failed epically "—goddamn—" she spun out of the way and ran into a wall "—friend—" she ducked again and his punch went _through_ said wall "—since—" he clipped her with a knife that appeared out of _nowhere_ , what the— "—nineteen, ouch, that hurt—"

"Sit _still_ ," the Winter Soldier muttered.

"Are you listening to me?!" Stevie demanded, planting a foot in his chest and shoving him away to get a bit of a breather. "Bucky's my best goddamn friend since nineteen twenty-seven! Also, how the hell are you moving that well in _leather_?"

There was some spluttered laughter by the door, where Bruce was watching.

The Winter Soldier whipped around at the sound, so incongruous with the rest of the scene, and then Natasha had two syringes stabbed into his neck: one for each side.

"Oh, Natalia, you—" something in Russian that probably amounted to the equivalent of "little shit". Then he turned back around and launched himself at her, blades flashing. Natasha's Widow Bites crackled with electricity and then they were a blur of silver and black and the red of Natasha's hair, something that even Stevie's enhanced eyes couldn't keep up with.

Then they broke apart, grinning ferally, and Stevie took advantage of the lull to scramble around the Soldier, grapple with him for a moment, and manage to perform her own rendition of Natasha's trademark of flipping people with her thighs. But the thing was: Stevie flipped him into the _ceiling_. He slammed into it hard enough to make two of the cheap plaster tiles fall out and half break on the floor and the Soldier, who'd had a _second_ impact to look forward to.

Amazingly enough, the Soldier rolled over and shoved Tony through the one undamaged wall with a massive shove from his legs, and then proceeded to laugh.

To _laugh_. Like it was the best goddamn thing in the world to get bodily slammed into the ceiling and then summarily dropped onto the floor.

Even Natasha raised both eyebrows.

"Stevie," he said between guffaws, causing both women and Bruce to jump at least six inches, "how the _fuck_ didja do that?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand there was the Brooklyn.

"Is this guy for _real_?" Bruce asked in disbelief.

That was when Iron Man blasted through the wall and tackled the Winter Soldier through the _opposite_ wall.

Stevie covered her nose and mouth to protect it from the floating dust of displaced drywall. "Iron Man, please report," she yelled, muffled.

"He could be faking, but I think he's out," Tony said in the comm.

"It only took two elephant tranquilizers and massive amounts of blunt force trauma," Natasha said dryly.

Stevie sighed. "Pack 'im up, people, let's get out of here before reinforcements arrive."

* * *

While Tony was running rings around pissed off SHIELD authority, Stevie and Natasha were waiting for Bucky—or the Winter Soldier—to wake up.

"They did something to him, obviously. I don't really think that it was active torture," the redhead said quietly. "He never shied away from me when we went on our missions. He wasn't the most tactile creature on planet Earth, but he didn't flinch away if I came up behind him and touched him. He's a brilliant tactician. He makes his own moves, the Red Room allowed him to run his own missions…mostly because if he didn't agree with the plan, he'd go off and do whatever the hell he wanted without a word to whoever was running the mission."

"That's something, at least," Stevie sighed. "He was a brilliant tactician even when I first met him; the army utilized the hell out of it. He was one of the very rare snipers in the war because he could see the entire picture and save his original plan from up high. We didn't have the earpieces back then, so we tried to rely on plans more than flying by the seat of our pants."

"He was the one who drew up the plans?" Natasha asked.

Stevie made a wiggle motion with her flat hand. "Sort of. When we first started, the Howling Commandos sat down and hashed out several plans that we could use regularly. When it came time to actually use them, Bucky and I would toss ideas back and forth over a map until we had a modification of whatever plan we had hashed out before, and then I'd tell the rest."

Bucky's breathing hitched for a moment and then leveled out again.

Natasha sent Stevie a warning look. Stevie shrugged.

"We used to name the plans after the streets in Brooklyn. Ninety percent of the time, it was because the plan was vaguely reminiscent of whatever fight I had gotten into on that street," Stevie said, laughing a little. "The other ten percent of the time, the street had a store with penny candy."

Natasha gave Stevie an odd look.

"What?" Stevie asked. "We were hungry. It'd been lunchtime."

The assassin gave the blonde a half-laugh, half-sigh. "And now you and Clint will get together and start naming plans after types of pizza. Now I know what to look forward to."

Stevie burst into giggles. "Yes, of course, I can see that going down. 'Plan Pepperoni, guys!'"

Natasha snorted, then fell out laughing. "That sounds _ridiculous_."

"I _felt_ ridiculous," Stevie said. "But now I have to use at least that one, so I can get all the villains to stop for a moment and ponder on the question of whether or not Captain America should be institutionalized."

"You _should_ be institutionalized," Bucky—or the Winter Soldier—said. "You run around in bright colors in the middle of a fight. I do not have to wonder whether or not you should be."

"You're either my best friend—whom I dearly love, but don't really care about what he thinks that I should wear—or you're supposed to be my enemy—whom I'm not really sure about yet, but I still really don't care about your opinion of my fashion choices," Stevie said. "In other words, suck it up, jerk. I ain't goin' anywhere."

Natasha's eyebrows arched.

"You are no friend of mine," the Winter Soldier said calmly.

"That's okay," Stevie said. "I'll just win you over with my bad fashion choices and my inability to keep my nose out of other people's business, just like I did last time."

Both assassins looked at her. Both looked disbelieving.

Stevie grinned from ear to ear. Natasha blanched and the Soldier blinked twice.

"Get your scrawny ass out of here," Bucky said grumpily. "Go do something constructive. Or destructive."

Stevie stood up and gave him a sloppy salute. "Yes, sir, Sargent!"

* * *

 **End.**

 **:)**

 **-Ruby**


End file.
